Credit juggernaut Visa today unveiled a plan that would allow holders of Ethereum to set up automated payments straight from their own, self-custodial wallets without the involvement of banks or other centralized organizations.
The concept, the result of an internal hackathon conducted by Visa earlier this year, would go a long way toward making the sometimes complex world of cryptocurrencies more approachable for customers, even though the service is far from groundbreaking to pretty much anybody who has a bank account.
The proposal is the most recent of several promising attempts to align digital assets with early proponents' vision of a banking system free of layers of fee-grabbing intermediaries, coming at a time when more than $2 trillion has been wiped off the market value of cryptocurrencies and following numerous high-profile bankruptcies of centralized exchanges and lenders.
Catherine Gu, who co-wrote the proposal and is the head of central bank digital currencies and protocols at Visa, claims that;
“If one of the major use cases of blockchain is for payments, then the basic requirement is that the blockchain has to function just as good as today, if not better.”
The idea was developed in a contest among Visa's staff members in February to find a solution for the issue of how an Ethereum holder can pay a bill with cryptocurrency at a later time while momentarily being without internet connectivity.
